Mass immigration has left an alarming legacy

The recent surge has put pressure on the fabric of society.

It is one of the most startling examples of disconnection between rulers and ruled in recent memory. The Labour Party flung open Britain’s doors to an unprecedented wave of mass immigration – and then professed itself bewildered by the complaints from those who found themselves unable to cope with the flow of new arrivals. Even now, anger over immigration has played a powerful part in the success of Ukip in the local elections, with its candidates falling over themselves to condemn the European Union rules on freedom of movement that will soon allow Bulgarians and Romanians to join their Eastern European neighbours in the British employment market.

One of the most obvious criticisms of mass immigration, now widely if belatedly accepted, was that the greater the volume of newcomers, the harder it would prove to integrate them. The latest research from the think tank Demos bears out this fear. It shows a continuing pattern of “white flight” from areas where indigenous Britons find themselves surrounded by new minority communities. Indeed, according to the latest Census, the number of white Britons in London was some 600,000 fewer in 2011 than in 2001 – the equivalent of a city the size of Glasgow – even though the city’s total population increased by almost a million. In the areas such people have abandoned, minority communities have become more concentrated and more isolated, raising the risk – as David Goodhart, Demos’s director, delicately puts it – of their having “limited familiarity with majority cultural codes”. In the words of Trevor Phillips, the former chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, this is “not good news for the cause of integration”.

It is important not to exaggerate the scale of the problem: one encouraging phenomenon is the way that members of ethnic minorities have been absorbed into communities, away from the major cities, that were previously overwhelmingly white (what Mr Phillips calls “the Ambridge effect”). But one has only to look at the ghettos of Paris to see what happens when immigrants are encouraged to build lives on the edge of the economy and society, and permitted to cluster in islands of deprivation without being absorbed into the mainstream.

Britain has an enviable track record in assimilating immigrants, yet the recent surge has put pressure not just on public services, but in some places on the fabric of society. That so many Britons should be on the move suggests that politicians have still not come to terms with the depths of the public’s disquiet, or done enough to reassure them that things will be different in future.